Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Singapore Election Recap

Singapore has had its election, and I've handed in my semester's grading, so it's time for a little recap on the elections.

The opposition did what they came to do -- win the five seats of Aljunied GRC. It's the first time the opposition has won a GRC, and it propels them to 6 out of 87 elected seats in Parliament, their highest total ever. The thing of real historical significance is that they did it over Lee Kuan Yew's threat that the PAP would use its power against Aljunied if the opposition won. (It was a healthy margin too -- 72,165 to 59,732.) In a properly functioning democracy, parties don't win elections by threatening to harm the voters if they lose. I'm very happy to see a precedent that tactics like that will backfire. Opposition supporters seem genuinely unhappy that the PAP's George Yeo had to lose in Aljunied, and there's been a lot of talk about what a shame it is that Tan Pei Ling is going to be in Parliament while Yeo isn't.

Outside of Aljunied, all the opposition won was the Hougang SMC seat they had before. In the other opposition seat, Potong Pasir, their incumbent had been disabled by a stroke and his wife lost by less than 1%. All opposition victories were Workers' Party. My Australian colleague was saying today that he thinks the Workers' Party would be the best current opposition party to run a government, because they're more capable, but he'd like the Singapore Democratic Party better as long as they're in the minority because their idealism would provide the best alternative vision for Singapore.

My favorite opposition candidate was gay migrant worker activist Vincent Wijeysingha, whose GRC slate lost by a 60-40 margin. All indications from the TV news and my girlfriend are that he was pretty happy to have gotten 40% of the vote in a district where the opposition didn't even run last time.

The surprise star of Election Night, however, was Returning Officer Yam Ah Mee, the election-office bureaucrat in charge of announcing final results. His dull, high-pitched monotone got people laughing that night, and now has spawned over a dozen wacky remixes on YouTube.

who we are

Nicholas Beaudrot is an accidental political observer living in Seattle, Washington. By day he writes software for Amazon.com, snowboards, and plays ultimate frisbee. By night [and morn] he posts to this blog, runs the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, and tries to cook decent Italian cuisine. A graduate of Brown University with a joint degree in Mathematics-Computer Science, in late 2003 Nicholas felt the urge to put his knack with numbers towards a greater social purpose than winning his fantasy baseball league or taking up poker, perhaps in an act of penance for not voting in 2000. He has been spotted standing in line for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, on the Atlanta area quiz bowl program "Hi-Q", and as a young boy in national broadcasts of the Christmas Eve service at the Cathedral of Saint Philip. If you play Halo 3, Team Fortress II, Rock Band 2, Catan, or a number of other games, he's on Xbox live as niq24601.

Neil Sinhababu is a philosophy professor at the National University of Singapore. It's a tropical island with good public transit and they're very nice about not caning him. He's fond of red-state college towns like Austin, where he got his PhD. Much of his research is in ethics — hence his alias "Neil the Ethical Werewolf," which contains the name of his philosophy blog. He has also published on Nietzsche and on how to have a girlfriend in another universe. His utilitarianism shapes his goals and tactical views, and makes it impossible for him to stay away from politics. At Harvard, he won a student government election by eating fire in each dorm room in his district. He'd be happy to use this skill to help Democrats in tough races. He likes drinking with smart people and dancing in altogether ridiculous ways. At his last project, War or Car, he showed that you could buy each US household a Prius or each panda a stealth bomber for the price of the Iraq War.